Everything You Do Without Thinking, Someone Once Decided

Medieval time was task-based: a stretch of time ended when the job did. Church bells marked the canonical hours, which stretched and shrank with sunrise and sunset — a summer "hour" was longer than a winter one. In 1355 the cloth masters of Amiens petitioned King John II for a bell in the marketplace to sound the start of work, the meal break, and the end of the day. Petitions of exactly this kind open Jacques Le Goff's famous 1960 essay "Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages."

The crown granted it. Over the following century the textile towns of Flanders and northern France raised their own work-bells, owned by the town hall rather than the church. In 1370 Charles V ordered every clock in Paris set to the royal palace's mechanical clock, built by Henri de Vic: hours of equal length replaced the elastic canonical hours. Four centuries later Josiah Wedgwood pushed the logic to its conclusion at his Etruria pottery — clocking-in tickets, a dedicated timekeeper, fines for lateness. That is where E.P. Thompson drew most of the evidence for his 1967 essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism."

The green presence dot, Slack read receipts, hours-tracking software — the fight is unchanged: who has the right to measure your time. Remote work removed the commute, a natural boundary between days, and so the whole day is once again a unit available for capture.

The Tudor great house was built enfilade: rooms opening into rooms, so reaching the innermost meant passing through all the others. Masters and servants routinely ate and slept in the same hall. "Private," at the time, carried something closer to its root sense — deprived of public standing — and was no compliment.

In the 1650s the architect Roger Pratt designed Coleshill House in Berkshire for his cousin, running a continuous corridor down the central axis and adding a back staircase. He wrote down the reason: so that servants could move about without entering the family's rooms. Almost simultaneously, Samuel Pepys began his diary on 1 January 1660, written in shorthand — a form addressed to nobody but himself — and stopped in 1669 as his eyesight failed. By the 1690s corridors, door locks and private studies were standard in English houses.

The arms race of open-plan offices and noise-cancelling headphones; remote work converting private space back into a site of production. The boundary of privacy is still set by circulation and property, not by preference.

Medieval European cities had public baths as a matter of course: Paris counted more than twenty étuves in 1292, and the stews on London's Southwark bank were public facilities regulated by guild and city. In Song-dynasty Kaifeng bathhouses were likewise an established trade — the Dongjing Meng Hua Lu lists them as ordinary commerce. Bathing was urban infrastructure, not a luxury.

Syphilis reached Europe in the late fifteenth century, plague kept recurring, and medicine supplied an explanation: hot water and steam open the pores and let miasma in. Bathhouses were reclassified as sources of contagion. In 1546 Henry VIII ordered every stew in Southwark shut. For nearly three hundred years elite European cleanliness shifted to "dry washing": not washing the body, but changing white linen often — the whiteness of the collar was the measure of cleanliness. Georges Vigarello's Concepts of Cleanliness (1988) records the extreme case: Louis XIV used a bathtub a handful of times in his life while changing several shirts a day. The return trip waited for Edwin Chadwick's 1842 report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population and the Baths and Washhouses Act of 1846.

Pandemic-era surface-disinfection protocols came and went; decades after antibacterial products went mainstream, microbiome research began pointing to the costs of over-cleaning. Hygiene standards are a function of theory — change the theory and the standard turns around.

In 1004 the Byzantine princess Maria Argyropoulina married into the Venetian ducal family and ate with a small golden fork. The cleric Peter Damian denounced it as decadence, and when she later died of plague the sources recorded it as divine retribution. For six centuries afterwards Europeans took meat from a shared dish with hands and knife. In 1530 Erasmus published De civilitate morum puerilium, specific to the point of instructing boys not to return a bitten piece of meat to the common platter and not to blow their nose on the tablecloth — more than thirty editions in thirty years.

In 1608 the English traveller Thomas Coryat brought a fork back from Italy and used it in London, where friends mocked him as Furcifer — Latin for fork-bearer, and also for scoundrel. Forks did not become common in England until the eighteenth century. Over the same span China moved in the opposite direction: before the Tang, dining was individual, each person served at a separate low table (traces survive in the Dunhuang murals and in The Night Revels of Han Xizai); once high tables and chairs spread across the Tang–Song transition, communal dining from shared dishes became the norm. Europe moved from the shared platter toward individual utensils; China moved from individual settings toward the shared table — in the same centuries, in opposite directions.

Video-call etiquette wrote itself in two or three years: camera on or off, when to mute, whether you may eat. Nobody designed it, yet it hardened faster than any employee handbook.